뉴스

Tanzania: PM - Educate Citizens On Formal Land Agreements

[Daily News] Iringa -- PRIME Minister Dr Mwigulu Nchemba has directed leaders across the country to educate citizens on the importance of formalising land transactions through written agreements, instead of relying solely on trust.

GB: politics of ambiguity

THE people of Gilgit-Baltistan joined Pakistan at the time of independence after liberating the region from Dogra rule. It was a unanimous aspiration to become part of the Muslim state. Assuming the relationship would be formalised through constitutional inclusion and political empowerment, GB’s people aligned themselves with mainstream Pakistani political parties, unlike Azad Kashmir, where indigenous political parties continued to play a significant role. Unfortunately, instead of the evolution of a locally rooted political architecture or democratic compact specific to GB, governance came to be dominated by the PML-N, PPP and PTI, who viewed GB through the lens of national power politics, strategic utility, electoral expansion, patronage and resource control, rather than genuine political empowerment. Consequently, while there are elected governments, there’s no meaningful self-governance. The first problem is the absence of a consistent ideological commitment by these parties to resolving GB’s constitutional status. Promises of autonomy, reforms and provisional provincial status are repeatedly made during elections, but not one party has delivered on their pledge when in federal power. The unresolved constitutional ambiguity serves the interests of centralised authority because it allows decisive control without assuming full constitutional obligations. A second problem is the import of a confrontational mainland political culture into a socially sensitive and geographically isolated mountain society. Politics has become polarised around loyalties to party leadership in Islamabad. Local leadership often emerges not through grassroots struggle or public legitimacy, but patronage networks, loyalty to party centres and access to federal power. This weakens local institutions and stymies independent political consensus. The PPP introduced the 2009 Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self-Governance Order, which created the current political structure. However, while the order established elected institutions, overriding authority remained concentrated within federally controlled structures. The PML-N focused on infrastructure and connectivity projects, but made little attempt at meaningful local empowerment. The party was reluctant even to take ownership of the Sartaj Aziz Committee’s report because it recommended full constitutional rights for GB. (It also provided the intellectual basis for the Supreme Court’s landmark 2019 judgement.) Instead, the PML-N’s 2018 order diluted the spirit of the report and even rolled back several powers granted under the PPP’s 2009 framework. People in Gilgit-Baltistan take part in elections and form governments, but the real levers of power are not in their hands. The PTI raised expectations by discussing provisional provincial status and constitutional reforms. However, when proposals concerning fuller constitutional status were presented, the party effectively ensured the continuation of the restrictive 2018 governance framework. All three parties converge on several core goals: maintaining political influence through patronage networks; using local elites dependent on federal authority; preserving centralised control over strategic geography and resources; avoiding a final constitutional settlement; expanding bureaucratic structures that cultivate political loyalties. The result is a political culture in which elections become contests for access to state patronage rather than serious debates on constitutional rights, fiscal autonomy, institutional reform, environmental sustainability, or long-term development. Another major impediment is the fragmentation of local political consciousness. Federal parties often exploit regional, sectarian, clan-based and constituency-level divisions for electoral advantage. The resulting divisions weaken the possibility of a unified political position capable of negotiating collective rights. Frequent shifts in political loyalty have normalised a culture in which the political process resembles an auction for legislative support. The result is a paradoxical system. People participate in elections, elect representatives and form governments, yet the real levers of power remain externalised. The assembly administers limited local matters, while strategic decisions, constitutional questions, resource frameworks and fiscal dependency are controlled from elsewhere. Roads, contracts, bureaucratic appointments and symbolic projects dominate political discourse, while deeper questions of political dignity, resource ownership, etc, remain unresolved. GB’s long-term challenge is to develop an indigenous political vision capable of transcending externally driven party competition. Such a vision must articulate demands for accountable governance, constitutional clarity, economic justice and genuine participation in decision-making. Ultimately, GB’s tragedy lies not merely in flawed governance, but also in the normalisation of a political charade. Every five years, elections are held under a constitutionally undefined framework that changes governments without altering the actual structure of power. The process is at its core a ritualistic transfer of authority among federally controlled political actors while fundamental questions of constitutional status, political rights, institutional accountability, etc, remain unresolved. This ambiguity facilitates elite capture through a flawed political system that enables control over local resources without meaningful accountability. Public resources continue to be consumed by expanding bureaucratic structures, patronage networks and non-development expenditures. More troubling is the ill-defined governance structure in which critical decisions, including appointments to senior judicial and institutional positions, are made through opaque processes. Such a system effectively guarantees immunity for unaccountable decision-makers, while ordinary citizens continue to bear the burden of weak institutions, unemployment, and political uncertainty. This has reduced Sunday’s election to an exercise in futility. Yet beneath this stagnant order, a transformation is taking place. A new generation is emerging in GB — educated, technologically connected, politically conscious and unwilling to accept symbolic representation in place of genuine rights and participation. This rising Gen Z, perhaps the most educated and politically aware generation in GB, may ultimately challenge the cycle of constitutional ambiguity and political misgovernance. No political structure built upon perpetual ambiguity, exclusion and managed dependency can endure indefinitely. If meaningful constitutional reform, institutional accountability, and genuine empowerment are delayed further, we will witness not merely political dissatisfaction, but also a far more assertive and organised demand for full meaningful constitutional integration with Pakistan, irrespective of competing political and strategic considerations. The writer, a former IGP Sindh, belongs to Gilgit-Baltistan. Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2026

Une salariée de RTE menacée de licenciement pour le port d’un foulard sur son lieu de travail, selon la CGT

La direction du gestionnaire des lignes à haute tension réfute toute «position idéologique» et assure que «l’obligation de neutralité» à laquelle est soumise une entreprise publique comme RTE, a été a été formalisée dans règlement intérieur.

Beyond budget arithmetic

EVERY June, Pakistan’s budget season follows a familiar pattern: business groups repeat their proposals for relief, the government defends its targets, and taxpayers prepare for additional burdens. Yet a more fundamental question is rarely asked — what is the budget ultimately meant to achieve, and does it reflect a clear long-term national purpose? In principle, the budget is the state’s main instrument for promoting growth, improving public services, reducing poverty and raising living standards. In Pakistan, however, it has increasingly come to resemble an accounting exercise: mobilise sufficient revenue to finance a growing state and meet fiscal benchmarks agreed with the IMF. The result is a lopsided process that remains focused on extracting more from those already within the tax net, while paying insufficient attention to the quality of public spending, the need to broaden the base, or the incentives required for investment, employment and productivity. The Tax Policy Office was expected to introduce a longer-term perspective to this debate, but that wider vision is still not evident. The burden continues to fall, predictably, on the formal economy. Corporations, salaried employees, entrepreneurs, exporters, documented businesses and investors remain the most visible and therefore the most easily taxed. What receives much less scrutiny is whether public spending is yielding meaningful improvements in citizens’ lives, particularly in a country where a large share of the population remains below the poverty line. Pakistan has absorbed much of the fiscal cost of devolution without fully realising its potential efficiency gains. This distortion has become more pronounced since the 18th Constitutional Amendment altered Pakistan’s fiscal structure. Health, education, labour welfare and other social services were devolved to the provinces, which now receive a substantial share of national revenues through the National Finance Commission Award. The logic was straightforward: provinces, being closer to citizens, would deliver services more effectively, while the federal government would gradually withdraw from devolved functions and reduce its own size and cost. That second part of the arrangement, however, remains largely unfulfilled. More than a decade later, successive governments have shown limited willingness to undertake the constitutional, administrative and institutional reforms required to right-size the federation. Pakistan has, therefore, absorbed much of the fiscal cost of devolution without fully realising its potential efficiency gains. The results are plain: weak learning, poor healthcare access, child malnutrition, low productivity, millions of children out of school, under-equipped hospitals, inadequate skills training and persistently low female labour-force participation. Yet, even against this backdrop, the provinces are expected to post a combined budget surplus of roughly Rs1.6 trillion. This surplus forms part of the consolidated fiscal framework that enables Pakistan to meet primary surplus targets under the IMF programme. Fiscal discipline is necessary; Pakistan’s record on deficits and debt leaves little room for complacency. But every rupee retained as surplus is also a rupee not directed towards schools, hospitals, technical training and local services. The balance appears to have shifted too far towards meeting accounting targets and too little towards building human capital. The irony is that while existing taxpayers are repeatedly told there is little room for relief, substantial untapped capacity exists elsewhere. Agriculture contributes nearly a quarter of GDP but remains lightly taxed, while property taxation is among the weakest in the region. Large agricultural and urban wealth holdings generate limited recurring revenue because assessment remains weak, enforcement uneven and valuations often disconnected from market reality. Since provinces have constitutional authority over agricultural income and property taxes, meaningful reform in these areas could broaden the base, improve fairness and reduce the state’s dependence on taxing the same formal businesses and individuals year after year. It would also help strengthen the sense that the fiscal burden is being shared more equitably. The next budget should therefore reset fiscal priorities. Rather than treating compliant taxpayers as an inexhaustible source of revenue, policymakers should present a credible path towards relief for documented economic activity: lower excessive tax rates on salaried employees, entrepreneurs and businesses, phase out the Super Tax, remove distortionary levies, reduce cascading taxation and bring greater predictability to policy. Better incentives would support investment, exports, formalisation and job creation — the key objectives of fiscal policy. But relief must be matched by credible efforts to broaden the tax base, improve spending efficiency and mobilise provincial revenues from agriculture and property. Fiscal sustainability cannot rest indefinitely on squeezing a shrinking pool of compliant taxpayers. Provinces, meanwhile, should be judged less by the size of their surpluses than by measurable gains in education, healthcare, skills, productivity and poverty reduction. Pakistan’s fiscal debate remains confined to the narrow question of how to raise more revenue. The more important issue is how public finances can create opportunity, improve living standards and support durable growth. A budget should be more than a balancing exercise between revenue and expenditure; it should also reflect a willingness to reform the structure of the state itself. Unless Pakistan completes the unfinished agenda of devolution, broadens the tax base and channels provincial resources towards human development, it may strive to meet fiscal targets without delivering the broader prosperity its citizens are entitled to expect. The writer is a former CEO of Unilever Pakistan and of the Pakistan Business Council Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2026

G1 (Globo)

문화/연예

'Guinlagem do Camaco', a língua secreta dos mineiros da cidade de Carlos Drummond

A "língua" secreta dos mineiros Uma cidade, um poeta. O nome de Itabira é quase indissociável de Carlos Drummond de Andrade. O escritor, nascido em 1902, na cidade de 113 mil habitantes na Região Central de Minas Gerais, revolucionou a língua portuguesa ao virar de cabeça para baixo os formalismos da poesia vigente até então. Mas o que pouca gente sabe é que naquele mesmo local surgiu uma outra revolução linguística: a Guinlagem do Camaco. O surgimento dessa linguagem "secreta" está diretamente ligado ao contexto da exploração do minério na região. Foi dentro das minas itabiranas, no começo do século 20, que os trabalhadores encontraram uma forma de se comunicar sem serem entendidos pelos patrões, em grande parte ingleses. Era também uma maneira de dar um troco nos donos das minas, que falavam no idioma materno quando não queriam ser compreendidos pelos empregados. À primeira vista, as regras são simples. O princípio do Camaco é inverter os fonemas das sílabas das palavras, embaralhando os sons e tornando as frases praticamente incompreensíveis para quem está de fora. "Sovê lafa guinlagem", por exemplo, é "Você fala linguagem?". "Guinlagem do Camaco" é "Linguagem do Macaco". Assim, famosa introdução do poema E agora, José, de Drummond, viraria "E aroga, Sujé?". Mas nem tudo é lógica. Algumas palavras mais curtas se transformam em vocábulos que fogem a essa regra. "Não" vira "ônis". "Qualquer", "ualquiquelque". Essa é a magia da linguagem para o músico Rafael Formiga, um falante do Camaco. "As palavras criam um sentido dentro de um fonema pela inversão. E nos lugares onde você vai falar, mesmo com alguma diferença, todo mundo se entende. Tem uns detalhes muito ricos de linguagem e ao mesmo tempo quem vê de fora não entende e fica meio perdido, porque é normal que a gente procure regra", diz ele. "Isso demonstra uma capacidade de construção e de resistência incrível", explica o historiador e museólogo Paulo Assuero, também falante do Camaco. "Eram recém-libertos, em grande parte analfabetos. E tinham que dar soluções de como dizer as coisas que eles queriam sem que os ingleses entendessem. Virou uma provocação, expandiu", complementa o professor, também residente em Itabira. Das minas de ferro, o Camaco tomou as ruas. Virou a língua que os filhos falavam para conversar entre si, sem que os pais entendessem – ou a que os jovens usavam para fazer piada com forasteiros. "Nos anos 1960, 1970, quando chegava o pessoal de fora, essa coisa de interior, a gente ficava fazendo gozação com eles. Não entendiam nada", brinca Assuero, que também já surpreendeu alguns alunos dentro de sala com a fluência na língua. "Dois deles estavam colando na prova em Guinlagem de Camaco e achando que eu não sabia de nada. Depois que acabou a prova, chamei eles e falei em Camaco. Tomaram o maior susto", diverte-se o professor. Cidade de Itabira, Região Central de Minas Gerais Alair Vieira/ALMG A linguagem da resistência Na casa de Mauro de Alvarenga, o Camaco já é uma tradição. "Meus pais falavam quando não queriam ser entendidos por mim e pelos meus irmãos – até que nós aprendemos. Mas eles tinham aprendido com meu avô, que era ferreiro e fazia peças para as locomotivas de mineração. Ele trouxe o Camaco para dentro de casa e foi passando de geração para geração", conta. Para o historiador e museólogo Paulo Assuero, o Camaco também servia como provocação contra os donos das minas Foto: Alexandre Rezende/DW Nas mãos do cineasta Breno Alvarenga, filho de Mauro, a história da linguagem secreta da cidade de Drummond acabou virando tema do documentário Camaco (2022), premiado no Festival de Gramado nas categorias "Melhor Curta Júri da Crítica" e "Melhor Montagem". O filme reconstrói o caráter de resistência da linguagem entre os trabalhadores da mineração. "O Camaco nasce de um contexto muito politizado, de muita resistência. Funcionava também como forma de organizar greves, pedir aumentos, sem que fossem boicotados desde o começo", explica Breno. "Foi uma subcultura de sujeitos mais subalternizados, marginalizados e que por isso demorou muito a ser valorizado, porque a elite não vinha uma riqueza naquilo. Os pobres se comunicavam, mas os poderosos não entendiam. Isso é muito raro, porque geralmente a linguagem aparta as pessoas e são geralmente os mais ricos que conseguem acessar novas linguagens, não os mais pobres. Ela começa dessa inversão", ressalta o diretor de cinema itabirano. De acordo com o linguista e pesquisador Geuderson Marchiori, que pesquisou o tema na sua dissertação de mestrado pela Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (Ufop), o Camaco pode ser considerado uma linguagem secreta ou até mesmo um jargão técnico. No entanto, segundo ele, que rastreou falantes até a década de 1920, há uma função similar à de um quilombo. "A linguagem possibilita a convergência dessas populações minorizadas, que utilizam o Camaco como um território de luta e resistência. Embora o senso comum aponte o quilombo como um local de negros escravizados em fuga, o quilombo é um local de reorganização, de segurança, onde essas populações puderam se libertar da exploração e se reorganizar para resistir", complementa. Marchiori explica também que o termo "macaco" em "Guinlagem do Camaco" pode ter uma conotação racista, mas que há outras interpretações para o nome. "Tem quem diga que o Camaco é a linguagem relacionada à esperteza que os macacos teriam, a esse jogo de cintura, a essa performance de pular de galho em galho sem ser apanhado, sem cair. Existe ainda uma possibilidade de relacionar o nome da linguagem aos pequenos heróis, que são os pequenos animais muito presentes nas narrativas de origem africana, que são sempre os bichos menores, vistos como mais fracos, que se sobressaem pela esperteza." Cineasta Bruno Alvarenga produziu documentário premiado sobre a linguagem de Itabira Foto: Alexandre Rezende/DW Drummond falava Camaco? Apesar de terem surgido na mesma cidade e no mesmo período, Camaco e Drummond vinham de duas Itabiras diferentes. A linguagem, das minas e dos operários. O poeta, filho de fazendeiros, de uma parte da elite, mesmo que não ligado diretamente à atividade minerária. Talvez por isso, até hoje não foram encontradas citações do Camaco em crônicas ou poemas de Carlos Drummond de Andrade. "Naquela Itabira, a linguagem do Camaco era muito desvalorizada. Na maioria das vezes, era falada por pessoas negras. Foi uma subcultura de sujeitos mais subalternizados, marginalizados e que por isso demorou muito a ser valorizado, porque a elite não via uma riqueza naquilo", diz Breno de Alvarenga. Drummond também não ficou muito tempo em Itabira. Aos 18 anos, deixou definitivamente a cidade natal, mudando-se primeiro para Belo Horizonte e, depois, para o Rio. Mas, como ele mesmo dizia em entrevistas, aquele lugar estava sempre presente, como "uma fotografia na parede". E agora, Itabira? Atualmente, a cidade mineira – e mineradora – passa por uma crise existencial. Com mais de 80% da economia dependente da atividade, Itabira agora tem que lidar com o fim da exploração do minério cada vez mais perto. De acordo com as estimativas mais recentes, as minas da região serão paralisadas em 2052. "Fica essa relação. A cidade depende da mineração, do PIB. Mas também de algo além disso, porque tudo acaba. E aí? E aroga, Sujé?", questiona o músico Rafael Formiga, citando o famoso poema de Drummond. Para a musicista Nana Mendonça, que já trabalhou com oficinas voltadas à linguagem, a cidade precisa preservar o Camaco. "Hoje existem poucos falantes e, com o avanço tecnológico, as coisas vêm e vão embora muito rápido", diz ela. Em 2023, o município de Itabira registrou, em um decreto, a linguagem do Camaco como patrimônio cultural imaterial. No entanto, até agora, ainda não foram tomadas medidas concretas para a preservação. Mas é justamente na capacidade de sobrevivência e expansão do Camaco que muitos moradores de Itabira veem uma saída para um futuro em que a cidade terá que se reinventar. "Essa linguagem nos ensina sobre resistência. Ela é resistente ao boicote da elite em relação a ela e ela continua viva. E nos lembra que podemos resistir ao que a mineração nos apresenta hoje em dia. A mineração, claro, foi muito importante para Itabira, mas a gente fica com os prejuízos dela, com a degradação ambiental, com a poluição do ar, com a saúde precarizada por conta disso. Acho que a linguagem também pode nos lembrar com resistir, como podemos nos reinventar para o futuro aqui em Itabira", resume o cineasta Breno Alvarenga. Segundo Geuderson Marchiori, a chave pode estar não só no Camaco, mas também no próprio Drummond. Ou seja, no potencial cultural de Itabira. "A cidade continua exercitando a criatividade dela", afirma o linguista, que atesta: atualmente, o Camaco faz muito mais parte do dia a dia da cidade do que da própria mineração. "Os dados que consegui me mostraram que a Linguagem de Camaco é praticamente inexiste no contexto das minas e da atividade minerária. Uma mina, hoje, tem trabalhadores que não falam mais a linguagem – mas a cidade, sim", conclui. LEIA TAMBÉM: Defesa Civil alerta para frio em BH; temperatura pode ficar abaixo de 12°C até a próxima semana Operação desarticula esquema de fraudes em apostas online na Grande BH e bloqueia R$ 1 milhão em bens Vídeos mais vistos no g1 Minas:

RTHK News (Hong Kong)

Hong Kong, Uzbekistan move towards easing travel visa

The SAR government and Uzbekistan have agreed to begin detailed discussions on further relaxing travel arrangements, allowing travellers from both sides to stay visa-free for up to 30 days. Chief Executive John Lee who is leading a business delegation visiting Central Asia held a high-level meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Uzbekistan on Wednesday. Lee said on his social media page that they exchanged views on formalising the intent to advance the arrangement. Currently, HKSAR passport holders may visit Uzbekistan visa-free for 10 days, while Uzbek passport holders require a visa to enter Hong Kong. "The two governments will promptly advance the specific implementation measures to bring the arrangement into effect as soon as possible," Lee said. "I believe the implementation of visa-free arrangement will enhance exchanges between the two places, stimulate tourism, study and commercial cooperation and development, lay a solid foundation for long-term economic and trade relations for both sides, and assist Hong Kong in expanding into emerging markets in Central Asia," he added. Edited by Nazvi Careem

Channel News Asia

More red tape, less progress: China’s cadres struggle to adopt ‘error tolerance’

Beijing has long called for easing the burden of local cadres and reining in formalism and bureaucratic excess - a long-standing challenge within China’s vast administrative system.

South China Morning Post

More red tape, less progress: China’s cadres struggle to adopt ‘error tolerance’

Despite repeated directives to ease the burden on local officials and curb formalism, many of China’s cadres still find themselves trapped in a frustrating cycle of working harder yet achieving fewer tangible results, according to state-linked media. Banyuetan, an influential biweekly magazine affiliated with state news agency Xinhua, outlined five symptoms of this “busier-but-emptier” phenomenon in a report published on its website on Tuesday. Beijing has long called for easing the burden of...

Libération

Migrants : comment l’UE ouvre la voie à des expulsions sans morale et sans frontière

L’accord formalisé lundi 1er juin au soir entre les eurodéputés et les Etats européens sur les «centres de retour» à l’étranger, construits dans des pays tiers, a été précédé par une série de projets, de mesures et d’initiatives pilotes peu concluantes.

Dawn (Pakistan)

정치

THE UNRAVELLING OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias “I am in blood, Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth PROLOGUE This is and isn’t about America’s illegal war against Iran. It is primarily about hiding an empire in plain sight and now watching it unravel in plain sight. The war against Iran becomes a consequential event in tandem with other structural weaknesses, a fillip of sorts. It reminds one of the Soviet war on Afghanistan. That war, in and of itself, did not bring down the Soviet Leviathan. The process inhered in the very make-up of the Soviet Union. The war just shoved it over the precipice. But let’s get on with our purpose here. In August 2022, then-US President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. A $280 billion legislative package, it sought to revitalise domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The act was a response to a startling vulnerability: the world’s most advanced chips, essential for everything from F-35 fighter jets to surgical equipment to artificial intelligence, are overwhelmingly manufactured by a single company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), located on an island claimed as sovereign territory by America’s primary strategic rival, China. This dependence is not an accident of geography or a supply chain anomaly. The semiconductor industry wasn’t even hobbled by Covid 19. Despite its complex and far-flung operations, the industry works smoothly. The US dependence is the logical endpoint of a decades-long corporate strategy that maximised profit by outsourcing physical production while retaining only the high-value design and marketing ends of the value chain, the so-called “Smile Curve” strategy. The undoing of the United States in the Iran war may be far more significant than its defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It may well mark a historic milestone in the fraying of the position of the US as a global hegemon. But the seeds of this erosion of American dominance, argues Ejaz Haider, were laid long before its misadventure in Iran… The Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, to whom I shall return, would have been amused to see the revered smile curve — taught at prestigious business schools and which encourages firms to outsource capital-intensive manufacturing to focus solely on high-margin research and development (R&D), branding and marketing — as a classic trap of late-stage capitalism. In fact, the CHIPS Act stands as a state-level admission that this strategy, so profitable for individual corporations like Apple and NVIDIA, to name just two, has become a major geopolitical vulnerability for the US. This is the central paradox of America’s declining empire. The very mechanisms that generated unprecedented wealth have systemically dismantled the material and industrial foundations upon which that wealth ultimately rests. The decline of the American empire is not a partisan talking point. The US is a behemoth. It won’t just collapse one day like the Berlin Wall. Nor is a snapshot view the way to go. It is an ongoing structural process and a number of scholars have used longitudinal designs to analyse the trend lines. I argue that it is a slow, systemic unravelling across interconnected domains. First, the financialisation of capital, theorised most rigorously by Arrighi. Capital shifts from productive investment to speculative finance, generating short-term profits at the cost of long-term industrial vitality. It hollows out domestic industrial and political power, a process identified by American sociologist and political scientist Ho-fung Hung, who argues that off-shoring of production destroys the industrial ecosystem, skilled labour base and, ultimately, the social cohesion required for great power competition. Second, the erosion of the alliance system. And no, it’s not just Trump. Three deeper currents are involved: the gradual unravelling of the post-WWII security architecture; the economic failure of neoliberalism; and the imperial outreach baked into the very idea of neoliberalism. Third, the lateral diffusion of technologies, now commodified and everywhere. They help innovative and determined weaker powers offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers: Ukraine versus Russia; Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis versus the US-Zionist duo; and now Iran versus the US-Zionist duo. As I note later in this space, the war against Iran is a much bigger setback for the US than its wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Corollary: the post-WWII ‘Pax Americana’ is transitioning from a period of hegemonic stability, to use American historian Charles Kindleberger’s concept, into a protracted and likely irreversible, terminal crisis, to borrow Arrighi’s term. But let’s first begin with the peg: the war against Iran. THE PRESENT Since its inception, America has been at war: wars of choice, wars of conquest, wars for resources, wars to defend its hegemony, wars to spread “American values.” How or why does the Iran war stand out? Foremost, the conflict has confirmed the structural limits of US coercive diplomacy in a shifting multipolar world. It has exposed acute structural vulnerabilities in defence economics and inventory endurance, as well as a critical absence of pragmatic post-war planning and a misreading of societal resilience. The conflict has also underscored the changing nature of global alignments in a multipolar world. This comes with the collapse of coercive economic power. For four decades, the US has relied on sophisticated sanctions and lawfare to pressure Iran into subjugation. It has failed, showing the limits of sanctions, especially on fungible commodities. Even sanctions on non-fungible elements like technology can be circumvented. As in Iran’s case, the sanctioned state can develop indigenous expertise through varied strategies. There’s clear evidence that Tehran has developed complex and sophisticated non-dollar lifelines with China and Russia, rendering unilateral sanctions increasingly ineffective. It has used an array of strategies to blunt the effect: interchangeability (can’t sell to X; sell to Y); value retention (barter, use of cryptocurrencies); substitution and evasion (relying on third parties, covert ship-to-ship transfers, use of shell companies). Unlike the insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is not involved in ground combat in Iran (so far). It has relied on high-tech aerial and missile attacks through its formidable ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) capabilities. Iran has not responded through elusive, hit-and-run ground attacks. It has countered US technology through technology in a non-contact war. But its employment of technology is grounded in asymmetric capabilities: a large arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. The cost-exchange ratio, by most accounts, is unfavourable for the US. For instance, the Iranian Shahed-136 one-way attack drone has an estimated unit cost of $20,000 (some estimates put it at around $10,000). It is a simple, slow-moving, and relatively easy to detect drone. But it is also cheap and plentiful. To intercept it with costly SM-2 or ESSM missiles creates a cost-exchange ratio of between 30 to one and 100 to one. It is also a shoot-and-scoot system. Iran can afford to lose hundreds of such drones and produce some 1,000 per month. The US cannot afford to fire thousands of interceptors at them. And those interceptors take three to four years to manufacture. It is a cost-asymmetric war. Similarly, the US has been pulling out assets from the Pacific to the Gulf. The USS Boxer amphibious group is an example. Diverting naval assets from the Pacific physically manifests deployment overstretch. As Robert Farley, visiting professor at US Army War College notes, resources needed to prevail in one theatre guarantee weakness in another. It’s the same with all force deployments and employments: “Every missile allocated to one target is unavailable for another.” The contrast with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is instructive. In those theatres, the US was defeated by determined insurgencies, even as it bombed and bombed. The adversaries were willing to absorb enormous casualties, drag it out and inflict mission fatigue on the US. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, broadly speaking, the US won the conventional war expeditiously but then got bogged down. In the Iran conflict, while Tehran has demonstrated the ability to absorb much pain, the US is not facing elusive insurgents but a state with a sophisticated missile programme, a sharp understanding of force employment, a network of allies across the region (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Syria), and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Iran has also demonstrated adaptation under fire, used the operational strategy of dispersal and delegation, exercised deception, demonstrated growing targeting capabilities through ISR, rapid repair of underground sites after US-Zionist bombing and consistently shifted locations for counterattack operations. Can the US still bomb Iran? Of course. Will that be painful? Yes. Will Iran respond? Hell, yes. Would that raise the overall cost? You can bet your dime on it. It will be proof, yet again, that it is a slow grind and the US cannot achieve its objectives at a sustainable cost. Yet, it is stuck, because to walk away means it loses credibility. Trump needs a win; Iran is not prepared to give him that. The war has changed the ground realities. There is no status quo ante. The objectives remain strategically incompatible — ie we might get a pause, even a long one, but the essential causes remain unaddressed. Spoiler alert: Zionist entity. US President Donald Trump attending the return of the bodies of the first six American soldiers killed during the war with Iran on March 7, 2026: the lateral diffusion of technologies help innovative and determined weaker powers, such as Iran, offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers, such as the US | AFP THE POINTILLIST EMPIRE: HOW IT BEGAN American imperialism did not begin with grand pronouncements like the Monroe Doctrine or the Big Stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, though they give us a potent sense of a rising, expansionist power. It literally began with bird poop, which sounds about right if one were to understand imperialism as a crap enterprise. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 allowed US citizens to claim uninhabited, guano-rich islands. The act set a precedent for later overseas acquisitions. Historian Daniel Immerwahr calls this a “pointillist” empire. This practical, resource-driven, and often hidden expansion set a pattern that would define America’s power and military bases for the next century. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) established the continental empire, seizing vast territories from Mexico. This wasn’t a war of liberation but a war of conquest, not manifest destiny but a fig leaf to cover the musty crotch of violent expansion, economic greed and racial supremacy. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formalised the seizure of over half of Mexico’s territory. The Spanish-American War of 1898 definitively projected American power overseas. Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, in a personal letter to Roosevelt, called it a “splendid little war.” By its end, the US had seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. But the “splendid” label concealed a brutal reality, just like the payload of Trump’s “gorgeous B-2 bombers.” The subsequent Philippine-American War (1899-1902) resulted in Filipino genocide. That savagery has been systematically erased from American popular memory, even as Mark Twain was scathing in his condemnation and also did a fantastic job of calling out Rudyard Kipling for The White Man’s Burden. But this wasn’t all. Immerwahr documents that American forces employed waterboarding (yes, much before the darned ‘War on Terror’), concentration camps (“black sites”), and scorched-earth tactics that would be recognisable to any student of colonial atrocities. After World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted a new form of imperialism: liberal internationalism, rather than direct territorial control. Much has been written about the “Wilsonian moment.” British historian and diplomat E. H. Carr called it a utopian project, divorced from the reality of power politics. In fact, it wasn’t. The project was essentially colonial and Wilson’s liberal internationalism fit it perfectly. The mandates were thriving. The US Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations left a vacuum that no amount of idealistic pronouncements could fill. War did come. Carr gives us insights into why it became inevitable. The US emerged from the war as the leading power. The post-WWII order was a direct lesson learned from the intervening two decades. No more “isolationism”. The US must play the role of the hegemonic stabiliser. The core argument was simple and powerful: a stable world economy requires a single power to act as lender of last resort, maintain an open market for distressed goods, and coordinate macroeconomic policies. The US did that via the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan and a vast security architecture that spanned the globe. The quid for the quo? American dominance. The US was now fully involved. It bore the cost but the return on investment was handsome. It kept the US in the lead, even during the bipolarity of the Cold War and beyond. With the Berlin wall crumbling, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became the mascot for neoliberalism. History had ended; all the wagon trains were destined for one town. Some might arrive late, but arrive they would. Europe was pacified and rebuilt. Japan was demilitarised and transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency, giving the US what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege.” For three decades, from 1945 to the early 1970s, this system appeared to confirm the virtues of hegemonic stability. Real GDP growth in Western Europe averaged nearly five percent annually, and the US share of world manufacturing output remained above 40 percent. But beneath the surface, the seeds of decline were already being sown. ARRIGHIAN COUNTER World-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi were not focused on immediate “imperial overstretch” in the manner of British historian Paul Kennedy. Kennedy argued that empires declined when their military commitments outpaced their economic base. The US, he warned, was suffering from imperial overreach. For Arrighi, the decline was gradual and subtle. He argued that capitalist hegemonies move through repeating “systemic cycles of accumulation.” A phase of material expansion where capital is invested in production, infrastructure and trade, inevitably gives way to a phase of financial expansion, where capital seeks profit through speculation, lending and financial engineering. The material foundation is hollowed out even as the financial superstructure appears to boom. This was the logic of capitalism. The “autumn” of each hegemon is marked by a dazzling financial belle époque that masks terminal decline. The smile curve strategy is the purest expression of this financialisation and Apple is a textbook case. It designs its products, develops its chips, creates the operating systems, controls the branding, marketing and the retail experience. But it manufactures almost nothing. The iPhones and MacBooks are assembled by Foxconn in Zhengzhou and by Pegatron in Shanghai. The advanced chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. The displays come from Samsung in South Korea and LG Display. Apple captures an estimated 80-90 percent of the profit from each device, while the suppliers who do the actual physical work fight over the remaining scraps. Business schools love this strategy because it maximises corporate profits and shareholder value. But as Hung argues in his work on global value chains and the Arrighian counter, what maximises corporate profits does not necessarily maximise national power. In fact, it may systematically undermine it. By outsourcing the middle of the smile curve, the US has drastically hollowed out its industrial ecosystem. Combine it with the faith in short, sharp wars of shock and awe through high-tech precision weapons and we get the full picture of what has happened in the war against Iran. This is very different from the WWII industrial base of America. This brings us to TSMC and the chokepoint crisis. It manufactures chips designed by other companies (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) rather than designing and selling its own chips. Over three decades, TSMC has built an unassailable lead in advanced process nodes. By 2025, it was manufacturing 92 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. The entire global technology industry (including the US military and intelligence apparatus) became dependent on a single cluster of fabs (fabrication plants) in Hsinchu, Taichung and Tainan. China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary, has the physical means to blockade or invade the island. Whether it would do so or should is a different debate. On ground, the People’s Liberation Army has been systematically building anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, to prevent US intervention in a Taiwan scenario. It’s a fairly absurd position from the US point of view! Its technological supremacy is guaranteed by a factory complex on an island which, in theory, its primary strategic rival could potentially seize or blockade. To circle back to the CHIPS Act, this is the background. TSMC is now building a fab complex in Arizona. Intel is expanding in Ohio and Arizona. Samsung is building in Texas. But, as a 2023 Marketplace report noted, replicating TSMC’s “deep, deep process knowledge” will take years. The fab in Arizona has already faced delays, cost overruns, and labour disputes. Taiwanese engineers are reluctant to relocate to the United States. The set goes to Arrighi. America’s weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives | Shutterstock THE DOLLAR DILEMMA The dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency has been a central pillar of American power since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This exorbitant privilege allows the US to borrow in its own currency, run persistent trade deficits without penalty and, crucially, impose unilateral financial sanctions on states, corporations, and individuals. This weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives. China has been aggressively promoting its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as an alternative to Swift. The People’s Bank of China has signed bilateral currency swap agreements with dozens of countries, allowing trade to be settled in renminbi rather than dollars. Russia has demanded payment in rubles for its natural gas exports. India has established a rupee settlement mechanism for trade. Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies. The Central Bank of Brazil has announced that it is diversifying its reserves away from the dollar. And yet, the actual pace of de-dollarisation has been glacial. Several structural factors explain this “stickiness”, to use American political economist Benjamin Cohen’s term. First, there is network stickiness. The dollar’s dominance is not simply a matter of policy; it is an issue of deep, self-reinforcing infrastructure. Global supply chains, commodity exchanges, derivatives markets, and correspondent banking networks are all built around the dollar. Second, as various experts have argued, there is a lack of viable alternatives. The Chinese renminbi, despite China’s enormous economic weight, is not a free-floating, fully convertible currency. China maintains capital controls, a heavily regulated financial system, and a non-independent central bank. No foreign investor can be certain that their renminbi holdings would not be frozen or devalued by arbitrary state action. The euro, the second-largest reserve currency, is hobbled by the Eurozone’s fragmented fiscal system and the lingering scars of the 2011 debt crisis. Gold is impractical for everyday transactions. And cryptocurrencies are far too volatile and illiquid to serve as a reserve asset. Third is the absence of a deep, liquid and open bond market. A reserve currency requires a “safe asset” in which foreign central banks can park their surplus reserves. The US Treasury market, with $25 trillion in outstanding debt and extraordinary liquidity, is the only game in town. Result: while China and Russia publicly call for de-dollarisation, their central banks have themselves continued to accumulate US Treasury securities, because there is nowhere else to go. Corollary: the near-term prognosis for de-dollarisation is not collapse but slow erosion. IMF data shows the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from over 70 percent in 2000 to approximately 58 percent in 2025. This is not a precipitous decline, but it is a steady one. The debate is not if the dollar will lose its dominance but when. I have no expertise in this area and I have relied on studying existing expertise. Most analyses measure the timeframe in decades, not years. From that, my understanding is that increasing uncertainty, further weaponisation of the dollar, continuing application of sanctions and asset freezes will (a) erode the confidence that underpins the entire system and (b) force experts (and governments) to find alternatives. EPILOGUE: TERMINAL CRISIS Two other issues are important but I am only flagging them here for paucity of space: the implosion of neoliberalism and its internal effects and the fraying of the transatlantic alliance. Both are exacerbated by Trump but neither is a direct result of his election. Both are extremely consequential. The United States has not collapsed; not yet. Nor can it be defeated from outside. But it can crumble from within. The future is not about a return to US hegemony, certainly not in a unipolar sense. The industrial base may be gone but it can be rebuilt, albeit not overnight. Alliances are frayed; trust cannot be easily restored. The fiscal position is precarious, with a $35 trillion US national debt. Internal politics is deeply polarised, with a significant portion of the American electorate believing that the system is rigged against them. A lot of these factors, singly and in combination with other factors, are self-reinforcing. The future also lies in terra incognita, a contested transition to a multipolar world, whose contours remain unknown. A recent book by German political analyst Marc Saxer, Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World, is a sobering structural assessment of where the world and the US are headed. “Homo homini lupus est” (Man is a wolf to man) is how Saxer begins. With that statement, we are back to Plautus and Hobbes. This is not mere rhetorical flourish. Saxer’s wolf world is an analytic category, a systemic condition characterised by the absence of a hegemon capable of enforcing rules, the demise of neoliberalism, the collapse of shared legal-normative frameworks, the return of great-power competition, the rise of Middle Powers, many with regional hegemonic aspirations, and the normalisation of coercion as a primary instrument of statecraft. As I said to Saxer during the launch of his book in Lahore, for the Global South, it has always been a wolf world. Pax Americana did not keep the peace for the periphery. It financed selective peace on credit. The bill has now come due. The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider Published in Dawn, EOS, May 31st, 2026

Channel News Asia

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China expands curbs on foreign deals, tech transfer after Meta-Manus block

The framework, which takes effect Jul 1, provides a comprehensive and formalised legal basis for China to force the unwinding of completed overseas transactions.

SMOKERS’ CORNER: COUNTER HISTORIES

In last week’s column, I discussed how certain Pakistani historians challenged the ‘reactionary’ national narrative constructed by the state after 1971, when the country’s eastern wing violently broke away to become Bangladesh. The post-1971 narrative amplified Political Islam, weaving it into what was officially branded as the “Pakistan Ideology” in 1978. Though some historians began dismantling this construct in the 1980s, it took another three decades for their efforts to bear fruit. Today, the state has not only softened its stance towards these counter-narratives, but is actively borrowing elements from them to fashion a brand-new national identity. This emerging narrative seeks to reposition Pakistan as a moderate, organic continuation of the ancient civilisations that flourished along the Indus River for over 5,000 years. Works of scholars such as K.K. Aziz, Sibte Hassan, Ayesha Jalal, Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Waseem, Aitzaz Ahsan and, later, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Rubina Saigol, Pervez Hoodbhoy, M. Qasim Zaman, Manan Ahmed Asif and Ali Usman Qasmi, are instrumental in providing the intellectual material for this quiet shift. For decades, Pakistani historians who challenged the state’s narrative faced censorship, exile, isolation and financial ruin. Yet, the perspectives they championed are now quietly shaping the country’s evolving identity By the mid-2000s, counter-narratives became easier to evolve, but doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a rather dangerous pursuit. In this column, I will explore this, alongside a now largely forgotten historian who pioneered the pursuit of challenging state-curated history, long before the state’s reactionary turn was fully formalised after 1971 and was cemented in the 1980s. In 1977, the source material Aziz was using to write a book on the ‘sensitive’ Hamoodur Rehman Report, was confiscated and allegedly destroyed by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. The report was the outcome of a commission set up by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to investigate the civil war in East Pakistan. After Bhutto’s fall in July 1977 in a Zia-led coup, Aziz was forced to leave the country. In exile, he managed to find a research position at Heidelberg University in Germany. In 1985, during the peak of the Zia dictatorship, Aziz chose to return to Pakistan, where his brother-in-law provided him with a place to live in Lahore. Here he wrote his most influential book, The Murder of History. Though published by Najam Sethi’s Vanguard Books, The Murder of History faced severe distribution hurdles from a regime hellbent on making it disappear. The book had used original source material to expose the glaring historical discrepancies that had crept into Pakistani textbooks after 1978. According to the late author and journalist Khaled Ahmed, when Aziz ran out of funds, he approached several wealthy patrons that he believed valued intellectual pursuits. But none replied. Relief came in 1994 when Benazir Bhutto’s second government sent Aziz to London, employing him at the Pakistan High Commission, so he could continue his multiple research projects. This stability ended in 1996, when the Benazir government was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari. Fortunately, the alumni of Lahore’s Government College (Ravians) stepped in to fund his research and stay in London, though this support from the Ravians eventually dried up in 1998. Upon returning to Pakistan that same year, Aziz was told he could no longer stay at his old Model Town residence. His once-doting brother-in-law had finally had enough of him. Aziz tried to earn a living as a lecturer, but discovered that no college or university would dare hire him. The Murder of History had ruffled too many feathers in the state, even though Aitzaz Ahsan’s counter-narrative, The Indus Saga, was by then gracing the shelves of all major bookstores. Vanguard had already issued a second edition of The Murder of History in 1993 and, riding the wave of the popularity of counter-narrative literature generated by Aitzaz’s book, the publisher released a third edition in 1998. Driven by the increasing public interest in counter-narratives, The Murder of History finally began to sell well, more than a decade after it was first published. Although Aziz left Pakistan once more in 1999, The Murder of History had already established itself as an early work that systematically debunked the post-1971 narrative. It became an inspiration for a new generation of historians who have since driven a gradual shift in the state’s own historical outlook. Aziz passed away in 2009, having authored over 50 books. The Murder of History has gone through 12 editions and sold thousands of copies, vindicating a tome that long threatened the livelihood and life of its author for challenging a national narrative he refused to accept. Illustration by Abro Long before Aziz, though, there was Dr Ashiq Husain Batalvi. As a young scholar, Batalvi had worked closely with the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, and the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Following the creation of Pakistan in 1947, and particularly after Jinnah’s demise in 1948, Batalvi had a falling out with the country’s nascent ruling elite. To Batalvi, this new leadership was abandoning the path Jinnah had envisioned. He watched with dismay as the state apparatus was infiltrated by men who had actively worked against Jinnah. These included landed elites from the anti-Jinnah Unionist Party and Islamists with whom Batalvi held deep ideological differences. Sidelined by these factions, Batalvi left the country in 1954. Settling in Britain, he became Dawn’s foreign correspondent and earned his PhD from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His first post-Partition book was published in 1961, but it was in his landmark 1969 work Chand Yaadein Chand Tassuraat [Some Memories, Some Impressions] that he lamented in detail how post-Partition Pakistan had drifted away from its original inclusive and pluralistic ideals. Though a passionate Pakistani nationalist, Batalvi never returned to the country. To him, Jinnah’s Pakistan was long dead. He continued writing for Dawn, but his output as a historian in his lifetime was eventually overshadowed by more prolific counter-narrative historians such as Aziz, Ali and Jalal. As mentioned, while early counter-narrative historians faced immense struggles in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, things in this regard have improved significantly since then, unlike the tightening of intellectual spaces in present-day India. Yet, certain institutional no-go areas remain. For instance, no local publisher or bookseller dares to touch Qasmi’s 2014 study, The Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan. It remains one of the most thorough investigations into how the Ahmadiyya community was ousted from the fold of Islam in Pakistan. This is a stark reminder that, while the state’s narrative has softened on some fronts, certain historical truths are still deemed too dangerous to print. Published in Dawn, EOS, 31st, 2026

Hindustan Times

The Economic Times (India)

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DK Shivakumar chosen as Karnataka's next chief minister at CLP meet; oath likely on June 3

Shivakumar arrived at the Vidhana Soudha for the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting, where his appointment was formalised.

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Why a flexible asset allocation approach beats static exposure over the next 3 years: ICICI Pru AMC’s Ihab Dalwai

With Indian markets trading near elevated long-term averages, relying on a single, static asset class carries higher risk. According to Ihab Dalwai, Senior Fund Manager at ICICI Prudential AMC, high return dispersion means the real opportunity over the next three years lies in a flexible asset allocation framework that actively shifts capital between equities, debt, and commodities to deliver better risk-adjusted outcomes.Edited excerpts from a chat with the fund manager:How different is Active Asset Allocator Long-Short strategy from your existing Balanced Advantage Fund or Multi-Asset Fund, which you already co-manage?Unlike the traditional mutual fund offerings such as Balanced Advantage Funds (BAF) or Multi-Asset Funds, the Active Asset Allocator Long-Short strategy is structurally different as it operates within the Specialized Investment Fund (SIF) framework, which provides decent higher portfolio flexibility.While BAFs and Multi-Asset Funds primarily manage net exposure through hedging and dynamic allocation, the SIF structure allows us to deploy a wider range of derivative-based strategies. This enables the portfolio to potentially generate returns not only from directional market participation but also from relative opportunities across asset classes and market conditions.Another key difference is the breadth of the opportunity set. The strategy dynamically allocates across equities, debt, commodities, InvITs and derivatives, with the flexibility to actively recalibrate exposures depending on valuations, macros and risk-adjusted opportunities. The objective is to create a more adaptive portfolio that seeks smoother outcomes across cycles while maintaining a disciplined buy low, sell high philosophy.At a time when Indian markets are trading near elevated long-term averages, how are you reading the current risk-reward equation across equities, debt and commodities? Which asset class currently looks most attractive from a three-year perspective?From a three-year perspective, we believe investors should avoid thinking in terms of a single winning asset class. The current environment is more suited for dynamic asset allocation because return dispersion across asset classes could remain high.Equity valuations have corrected in pockets where expectations are low and such opportunities have increased over the last 1-2 years. At the same time, fixed income has become relatively more attractive after the sharp repricing in global rates. Commodities, especially precious metals, performed well over the last year due to dollar devaluation, however that trend has currently paused because of rising rates in the US.In our view, the opportunity today lies in actively shifting between these asset classes rather than remaining concentrated in one asset class. Over the next three years, a flexible allocation approach may potentially deliver better risk-adjusted outcomes than static exposure.Your framework talks about “being invested the right way at the right time.” What are the biggest macro variables driving your current asset allocation stance?Our framework for equities combines a valuation plus earnings overlays. In case of debt and commodities, our allocation is based on various macro indicators. The key macro variables we monitor include growth trends, inflation trajectory, liquidity conditions, real interest rates, currency movements and earnings cycles. At a broader level, we try to identify the prevailing growth-inflation regime because different asset classes tend to perform differently across economic phases. For example, equities and cyclical commodities generally perform better during growth-led expansions, while gold and duration assets tend to outperform during slowdown or uncertainty-driven phases.Commodities are emerging as a bigger allocation theme globally. Do you believe Indian investors remain structurally underallocated to commodities if we exclude household gold?Commodities has to be seen from a tactical allocation perspective rather than a structural allocation as they don’t pay either dividend or interest as other asset classes do. Hence, give the sharp run up in commodity prices, we don’t see an issue with relatively lesser allocation to commodities today.How do you see gold behaving if global growth weakens but inflation remains sticky?It is a tricky situation because the outlook on real rates is not clear. Historically gold as an asset class tends to do well when US real rates come off.What role do InvITs play in the portfolio construction process, especially in a rising interest rate environment?InvITs can play an important diversification role within the portfolio because they provide exposure to infrastructure-linked cash flow assets that are relatively distinct from traditional equity and debt instruments.In a rising rate environment, there can be near-term valuation pressure on yield-oriented assets, including InvITs. However, the impact also depends on the strength and growth visibility of the underlying assets and cash flows. Therefore, selective allocation becomes important rather than taking a broad-based view.Do you think that midcaps are now in a sweet spot and, barring a few pockets, unimpacted by the geopolitical conflict? In your Large and Midcap Fund, how overweight are you on midcaps?Midcaps continue to offer selective opportunities, particularly in businesses benefiting from domestic economic formalisation, manufacturing expansion, financialisation and government-led capex. However, after the strong rally seen over the last few years, valuations in certain parts of the midcap universe continue to remain elevated. Therefore, midcaps are not a homogeneous segment. Stock selection and valuation discipline become increasingly important in the current environment.Within the midcap universe, which sectors do you like from a 3-5 year perspective and why?The approach to midcaps has to be bottom up. Having said that, there are opportunities in certain platform companies and consumer facing businesses which have meaningfully underperformed over the last three years and have muted expectations from the market which makes them a good investment case today.

The Economic Times (India)

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Why a flexible asset allocation approach beats static exposure over the next 3 years: ICICI Pru AMC’s Ihab Dalwai

Premium Times (Nigeria)

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Nigeria, AfDB sign agreement to operationalise $7bn aviation transformation programme

The agreement formalises collaboration between Nigeria and the African Development Bank to accelerate aviation sector reforms and unlock large-scale financing for industry development across the continent. The post Nigeria, AfDB sign agreement to operationalise $7bn aviation transformation programme appeared first on Premium Times Nigeria.

The Hindu National